23 February 2026
There has been something of a delay in posting anything, but I have been making good progress in a number of areas. The model of the liberator is evolving to something looking complete but I need to address a few loose ends on that project. The garage is at a point where I could hand the lease back as only the last of the storage kit needs shifting and I will have 4 weeks to do that!
The main thing I have been working on is getting the lavarel firebird driver working and I've made good progress, but need to decide on a few basic steps before pushing forward. Using ADOdb on the bitweaver framework, all of the SQL is left to default to upper case, which most of the time works fine. Only the odd field has a clash with reserved words. The returned data is tidied so that keys in PHP are all lower case which is also tidy. Lavarel defaults to warpping everything in double quotes which is a bit of a cop out and while I've had a try at overriding it in the firdbird-support driver I've not touched the right code yet, so currently I am back with the wrapped table and field names and tiptoeing down the resultant individual errors. The problem of lastInsertId() has been addressed in that Firebird now returns the id after an insert and I can access it is if the PDO driver had created it. However when adding items it's not picking up the right value and I've not figured out why as yet. At least I can easily test it and at the moment I'm just playing with 'Add User' in webtrees which should use the sequence number as it's ID and then add secondary values which are currently failing as they are being saved to '0' rather than the 2 returned. I job to get stuck into later.
Was distracted this morning with a trip for a pneumonia jab and then sorting a video of part of the Tubular Bells concert I attended last night at Warwick Arts Centre. I'd recorded one of the sets, and I am happy with the results. The quality of my current tidy cut is not bad given I was sitting at the back of the Butterworth Hall and I can now see details I missed at the live event! Of cause we are not supposed to record these, but I paid for the CD anyway so I'm comfortable about having the video as well. The first mistake was to hold the phone vertically, I should have gone horizontal, but not sure I could have managed that for the 20 minutes of the set. The main problem was the recording will not load into Avidemux so I can edit it. With the help of Claude Haiku 4.5 I've produced a rotated and cropped version using ffmpeg, and have something usable, but the raw files will not play in VLC and trying to fix them with Avidemux only produced a minute or so clips. Still on the todo list is working out just why the phone recording are so problematic. While many of the 'converted' clips are showing thumbnails in dolphin, neither of the .mp4 files do, or the simple copy via Avidemux to .mkv, so with Claude's I recoded the raw video. While the recoded file is now displaying a thumbnail, it's still not running in VLC and Avidemux still has a sound problem :( On a plus side though, I have found I had mpv Media Player which does have the scroll bar which MPlayer is missing and has no problem with any of the files! This is all down to codec problems and I'm not sure it's worth any more time at the moment. Back to something productive.